There may be more landmines deployed per person in Kurdish Iraq (population around 3.5 million) than in any other region in the world. A 1993 State Department report estimates that the Iraqi army laid 3 to 5 million mines there during the Iran-Iraq war and in the months leading up to the 1991 Gulf war. Others estimate that the number may be as high as 10 million, including mines that Iran also laid. Rough estimates of the ratios for the worst-affected countries are one mine per person in Angola and Afghanistan, and one mine for every two persons in Cambodia.

Four years after Operation Desert Storm, and the mass uprisings that followed in the southern and northern parts of Iraq against Saddam Hussein’s regime, the country’s economic and social fabric is in tatters. Economic sanctions, following a destructive war and compounded by the Iraqi government’s abusive and divisive social and political policies, have devoured the country’s once substantial middle class and further impoverished the already poor. Even if tomorrow the sanctions were lifted and the regime were to vanish, the capacity of Iraqi society to reconstitute itself is in grave peril.

A public debate over the US-led economic sanctions policy against Iraq is long overdue. More than four years have passed since the Gulf war ceasefire and Baghdad’s bloody suppression of the popular uprisings that followed. The regime, the ostensible target of the sanctions, appears to be firmly in place. The vast majority of individual Iraqis, whose best interests are cited as a major justification for the policy, are suffering a degree of trauma and deprivation that has already set in motion a dynamic of social disintegration and self-destruction that will affect the entire region -- and may be very difficult to reverse.

Less than five years ago, the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein established a “safe haven” in Iraqi Kurdistan following Iraq’s brutal suppression of an uprising against the regime during March-April 1991. The mood among the majority of Iraqi Kurds was highly optimistic: A certain measure of self-rule had been forced on the central government in Baghdad, a goal for which they had been fighting for almost half a century.

The evacuation of several thousand Iraqi Kurds from northern Iraq by the US military in December 1996 constituted the last gasp of Operation Provide Comfort. This operation was launched in the spring of 1991, in the wake of the Gulf war and Kurdish uprising against Baghdad, as hundreds of thousands of Kurds, fleeing Iraqi depredations in the valleys below, escaped to the high mountain ranges that mark the Iraqi-Turkish border. In October 1991, the Iraqis withdrew, freeing the Kurds to carve out an autonomous region. This territory was nominally protected by an allied Military Coordination Center based in the Iraqi border town of Zakho and by allied fighter jets and AWACS planes patrolling the no-fly zone above the thirty-sixth parallel from the US airbase at Incirlik, Turkey.

In his State of the Union address in January 1998, President Clinton won thunderous applause for threatening to force Iraq “to comply with the UNSCOM regime and the will of the United Nations.” Stopping UN chemical and biological weapons inspectors from “completing their mission,” declared the president, defies “the will of the world.” In the next three weeks, the White House ordered a massive show of force in the Gulf. Even traditional hawks, however, realized that a bombing mission could undermine American hegemonic interests in the Gulf that are served by a continuation of the sanctions regime.

Not all in Clinton’s administration were happy with his grudging acceptance of the UN-Iraqi agreement negotiated by Secretary General Kofi Annan. It is likely, however, that at least some were grateful to have a way out of their self-created political trap. Weeks of escalating rhetoric against the backdrop of a massive and carefully choreographed military buildup in the Persian Gulf and continued defiance in Baghdad, had brought Washington to the brink of launching a major military strike. The only alternative would have been to acknowledge that it really had no viable policy toward Iraq.